The Wedding
Li Luming
The Wedding, 2005
oil on canvas
2000 x 1500 mm
signed and dated verso
Provenance: Alexander Ochs Gallery, Berlin. Private Collection, Auckland
Like many of China’s most powerful and affecting contemporary artworks, the work of Li Luming references China’s Cultural Revolution. Documenting events from the lives of individuals during this time, Li Luming’s works are primarily grey and monochromatic. In much of his art, Li Luming consciously references German artist Gerhard Richter. Key pieces such as The Wedding (2005) for example, draw on Richter’s practice, in particular, his series the Baader-Meinhof Cycle 18. Oktober 1977 (1988). This 1988 cycle consists of fifteen oil paintings, also in grey, that were based on photographs of members and events connected to the German Red Army Faction. Now held in MOMA’s permanent collection, the poignancy of Richter’s collective cycle has made it one of the twentieth century’s key works.
Like Richter, Li Luming uses found imagery from a defining period in his country’s history and cultural past, as the basis for his oil paintings. Blurring the images in his paint application, both Li Luming’s use of grey and reference to Richter’s cycle imbue the works with a haunting melancholy. In contrast to many of the following generation of Chinese artists, Li Luming abstains from making overt protest or political comment through his works. Instead, his works are delicate, misty evocations of another time, but a time that remains current through the force of collective memory.
Though Li Luming is well-known in China, he is as yet, less well recognised in the West. He is relatively early in his painting career, as for many years, from the late 1980s onwards he was a prominent publisher of artists’ books for many Chinese artists. This role, complicated by the stringent requirements of state censorship, has been vital in the introduction of a number of Chinese artists to the Western world. (Text by Winsome Wild)